Name: The Sense of an Ending
Rating: 4.3 (471 reviews)
Author: Julian Barnes
ISBN: 9780224094153

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Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM By Julian Barnes

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best selling Arthur George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse This intense novel follows a middle aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about until his closest childhoodBy an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best selling Arthur George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse This intense novel follows a middle aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present Tony Webster thought he d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes s oeuvre.

Title: The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
ISBN: 9780224094153
Page: 358
Format: Hardcover

Comments

Petra X Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Just brilliant The book at first appears, right to the end, to be a rather mundane story of the life of an ordinary man who is neither perceptive about the people around him nor does he see himself in a clear light Only at the end is it apparent that there were two different stories being written at the same time and you can perceive all the clues to the second story only in hindsight although they were so clear, you wonder how you could have missed them You wonder how the protagonist could have [...]

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K.D. Absolutely Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

When Veronika said, You don t get it You never did I told myself so, why don t you tell him Grrr If only these people Barnes characters would sit down and discuss amongst themselves, then there will be no problem Then Tony Webster will not have to spend all his life trying to grapple the memories he thought to be contained in his whole pathetic life You see, Tony Webster is a double sided man he seems to be this gentle go with the flow nice man who respects his girlfriend not to have real sex un [...]

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Jim Fonseca Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

This is by Julian Barnes so we know it will focus on memory and its tricks Some examples but what you end up remembering isn t always the same as what you witnessed And I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty And again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time The book is a Booker Prize winner, [...]

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Steve Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Some of my closest GR friends may have noticed that I ve been less active around here lately Unfortunately, there s a reason for that It s nothing dire, but it s still sad for me to have to say As it turns out, I m going to have to hang up my spurs, albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with my friends here, and not even much to do with me It has to do with my niece s husband who until recently had been a web application developer at The past perfect tense applies because, while it s all we [...]

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Cecily Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

This is an exploration of memory, exquisitely written as the thoughts of an old man, looking back on his life good enough to merit 5 , despite the somewhat contrived ending ironic, given the title.ImageryIt opens with six watery images an unexpected word in several of them makes them vivid , each of which form part of the story I remember, in no particular order a shiny inner wrist steam rising from a wet sink as a frying pan is laughingly tossed into it gouts of sperm circling a plughole, befo [...]

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Auntjenny Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Definitely has a plot, but a pathetic one Thin characters, cliched ideas I feel annoyed by having read this book OK, there was one good quote Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn t all it s cracked up to be But ultimately, the plot is a gimmick I don t understand how this won the Booker Prize What the heck did Tony ever do to anyone except send a crappy letter to an ex girlfriend who was [...]

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Emily May Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

I think my years as a philosophy student were actually detrimental to my enjoyment of this short novel about life and memory The stuff that has left other people reeling in amazement reminded me of little than just another essay on the mind and the way we think, the way we interpret events and the way our memories can let us down Mr Barnes is clearly a clever man and his writing is a touch complex but always charming However, is this really that original any I don t think so I can point you tow [...]

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Jason Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Tony Webster is a shallow douchebag.First of all, let s get something straight I don t believe people should be judged too harshly for behavior they exhibited in adolescence That s not to say that people are not responsible for actions they committed in their youth it just means that their actions as teenagers do not necessarily reflect the kind of people they will become as adults So my problem with Tony Webster isn t that he was an asshole in high school In fact, I d probably be a bit hypocrit [...]

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Teresa Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

This book got under my skin Not in the negative way, like what Tony, the narrator, may be doing, or trying to do, to Veronica, who 40 years ago was his first serious girlfriend, but in the way he describes how his ex wife would dress a chicken slipping butter and herbs under the skin, with a delicate hand, never breaking the outer layer I was hooked from the first page and even when I wasn t reading it, I was thinking about it, even in my sleep, or, likely, semi sleep I was pulled into the drea [...]

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Adina Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

4.5 Update There is going to be a movie after the book and it is coming out this month if interested you can see the trailer here facebook vintagebooksA story about the unreliability of memory and how we can chose to forget or to reinvent the past in order not to remember disturbing truths I discovered this book by Julian Barnes when reading comments about Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan which is a book I also enjoyed The tone of the story is quite similar in some ways Barnes, McEwan and Coetzee have [...]

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Paul Bryant Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Such was the big fat craptastic big reveal groanworthy lurid pulpy Victorian melodramatic you got to be kidding ending with no sense that the two stars this novel was hanging on to by its fingernails up to page 130 slipped out of its grasp and it ended up with the ignominious one star, but since that puts it in the same company as many much loved novels it may well be worn as a Badge Of Honour I envisage one of those peelable stickers on all future editions A P BRYANT ONE STAR NOVEL and Julian B [...]

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Nataliya Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending has a lot packed in the short 150 or so pages Memory and history, responsibility and blame, deceit, misunderstandings, aging, guilt, remorse and, of course, a safely passive coasting on the smooth sailing surface of life, occasionally interrupted by the tidal waves of unexpected upheavals and disturbances, just like Severn Bore, seen once by Tony Webster and Veronica We live with such easy assumptions, don t we For instance, that memory equals events plus tim [...]

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Marita Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Is it because the main protagonist and I are of an age that I enjoyed his ruminations on memory and time so much Yes, that is part of it, but Julian Barnes has a wonderful turn of phrase and he is a keen observer who knows how to articulate those observations.I loved the elasticity of time and the relationship of memory to time how time slows down or speeds up how time binds us and yet, as the narrator Tony Webster argues, time is a solvent rather than a fixative how time affects memory so that [...]

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Lizzy Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.From the first page, I was carried away by Julian Barnes s The Sense of an Ending and its wonderful story For such a short novel it seems to waste no words, and only speeds between breaths to tell us about the capriciousness of our memories I think it cannot be truer that memory is a fickle friend More than a story, this was a lyrical lesson with a [...]

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Jeffrey Keeten Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

I had never really intended to read this book, and I certainly had no intention of owning it I was browsing in a BN sitting out a winter storm in Lincoln, Nebraska and ran across of stack of The Sense of an Ending with BOOKER PRIZE WINNER blazoned across the front of the book I dug through the stack of third printings and there near the bottom was one book with BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE on the cover Well it is sort of cosmic for a collector such as I to find one first American edition in the pile Sma [...]

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Rakhi Dalal Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Has it ever occurred to you that while you are complacently sitting, basking in the self acquired glory of wisdom, you chance upon something, like an incident, a person or a written word, which forces you to revisit your understanding and knowledge of the life as you know it And then you gasp with a sudden disbelief at the ignorance which might have silently crept in and stayed along while you felt contented with your version of perceptions I felt the same while reading this book To say that I l [...]

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Liz Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

This book literally grabbed me from the first page I found myself highlighting phrase after phrase The narrator starts the book looking back at his school days He s got the presence of mind to understand exactly what he and the other lads were like in those days He also has the understanding of how memory truly works what you end up remembering isn t always the same as what you have witnessed Or this I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes The writing here is d [...]

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Brina Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

I find it appropriate that my last review of 2017 is titled The Sense of an Ending Recently I read In the Noise of Time by Julian Barnes Upon returning it to the library, two of my branch librarians asked me if I had ever read any of Barnes other works, and I answered, unfortunately, no While reading about Shostakovich, I immediately fell in love with Barnes flawless prose My librarians know their patrons and reserved me The Sense of an Ending A Man Booker winner, Barnes has wowed his readers wi [...]

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Fabian Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

The Sense of an Ending is the type of British novel ALL OTHER AMERICAN NOVELS TREMBLE IN THE PRESENCE OF It is blessed with an aura of flawless, impeccable English perfection the prose is exquisitely clean concise, GODLY by most especially my own standards It is an uncommon, unpolluted work that should be embedded in psychology books everywhere the gears of life are described in their rare light, in degrees that, you must agree, can only possibly come from another world, or another dimension Bar [...]

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Jennifer (aka EM) Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Maybe, like Tony, I just don t get it, but this was a whole lot of Man Booker winning to do about very little Pretentious, upper middle class schoolboys behave badly, and through too much ego and too little self knowledge and empathy, too many book smarts and not enough life experience inflict cruelty on ex girlfriends and others as they cavalierly grow out of their coddled adolescence into a ho hum average life It then comes back to haunt them or one of them, anyway in late middle age, and as m [...]

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Orsodimondo Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

LA BESTIA NELLA GIUNGLA un libro breve, solo 145 pagine di testo ma, io ne avrei volute di pi un libro piccolo, ma grande di pensieri elaborazioni riflessioni, suggerite e generate libro che ha vinto un premio importante Booker Prize 2011 , con pieno merito mi pare , credo si sia capito, un libro che mi piaciuto molto, che mi ha lasciato pieno di stupore, di domande con risposte che fatico a trovare Un libro che mi ha commosso.Jimmy Broadbent Tony Webster, protagonista dell adattamento cinematog [...]

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Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

1.99 Kindle sale, Feb 10, 2018, for this literary fiction novel that does a great job of playing with perceptions I pulled out this short Booker Prize novel one night, thinking I d just read a bit to get a feel for it, to know what to tell my book club about it, since I needed to suggest a choice of 4 or 5 books to my book club the next day for their vote A few hours later I finished the book, moved but a little bewildered In the first fifty pages the narrator, Tony, tells of some events in his [...]

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Fionnuala Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Reviewed in January, 2012One of the things I admire about Barnes is the pared down nature of his writing Every word counts The division of this novella into two parts also counts The reader could start with Part Two and the book wouldn t be any less clear In fact, possible answers to most of the questions raised at the end of the book can be found on rereading Part One More enlightenment comes while rereading Part Two The following paragraph may contain spoilers As to the possible answers to the [...]

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Riku Sayuj Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

What a wonderful wonderful novel No, not a novel, or a novella it was a poem, with rhythm, repetition, and cadence, looping back on itself Yes, it can only be called a poem a poem about time, about forgotten time, long gone cold Having laid off from new Booker winners after a traumatic experience with Adiga, I started on this book with a lot of trepidation But I was drawn in from the first paragraph and the amazing childhood anecdotes seemed to be promising a night of unbroken reading I went thr [...]

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Andrew Smith Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

I bought this book at Paddington railway station, to read on the way home It s not my normal type of book but I knew it had won the man Booker Prize and I d seen some positive comment in the press It s a short book one of the reasons I bought it and it quickly confirmed itself to me as a wise purchase I was laughing out loud after a few pages, totally hooked Barnes is obviously a clever guy and I found I had to look up a few words along the way I was home by then But as a former lexicographer ye [...]

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Aldrin Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

In the last sentence of the first paragraph of the new, Booker shortlisted novella The Sense of an Ending, the narrator states that what you end up remembering isn t always the same as what you have witnessed Preceding it is a short list of what he remembers a shiny inner wrist, steam rising from a wet sink, gouts of sperm circling a plughole, a river rushing nonsensically upstream, another river, and bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door Following it is a hundred plus page expansion of [...]

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Iris P Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

The Sense of an EndingIt s probably safe to say that most of us have, at some point in our lives, done or said things we have come to regret That phone call you made when you were extremely upset That bitter email you shouldn t have written That text message you were too prompt to send If you had the opportunity of visiting a younger version of yourself and review what that other you said, felt, discovered, did or didn t do, how do you think it would measure up against the older you Would you be [...]

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Michael Finocchiaro Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Umm I mean this book was written ok and I get it, the whole unreliable narrator thing, but the protagonist is like a psychopath or what I mean how could he have forgotten And if what I think happened happened, WTF would Veronique still be talking to him Why would the mom send him 500 pounds WTF was that mathematical formula about Maybe I a just too dense for English post modernism and I gotta still to American post modernist, Hmpf Disappointed

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Kinga Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

Let me begin by saying that I don t mind short, understated books novellas if you like I do like them What I don t like is paying the same money for a 150 page book, that could have easily been written by a skilled writer in a month, that I have to pay for a 826 page book involving loads of research full of medieval and linguistic references yes, I am reading Nicola Barker s Darkmans I just don t think that s fair.That said, it was a pretty decent book It follows a very simple formula of an old [...]

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Gerald Jan 27, 2021 - 22:07 PM

QUADRUPLE SPOILER ALERT In terms of overt clues and Adrian s equation, Adrian had an affair perhaps not so brief, near the end of his life with Veronica s mother Sarah, who bore the child, also named Adrian, who was later sent after Sarah s death to a caregiver facility.I think what nags at Tony at the end is that there are other possibilities that could fit the evidence better Unless Veronica spills it, or Adrian s diary is not burnt after all, Tony can never know for sure In all scenarios he s [...]

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The Sense of an Ending By Julian Barnes By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best selling Arthur George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse This intense novel follows a middle aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about until his closest childhoodBy an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best selling Arthur George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse This intense novel follows a middle aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present Tony Webster thought he d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes s oeuvre.

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